The Tom Brevoort Experience

A year or two ago, I was on a convention panel where I was able to tell former X-MEN editor Louise Simonson just how much she’d screwed all of those X-MEN editors who came after her with her performance in that role in 1982. An incredible number of high-quality releases came out of the X-Men line in that year, including the X-MEN: GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS graphic novel, the l...

As I’ve mentioned before, my friend David Steckel, whom I’d met through the Sachem School District’s gifted student program, was a much a fan of the Fantastic Four as I was. What’s more, he had inherited a bunch of comics from an older relative who had outgrown them, so he had an assortment of older issues that went back some years. We would routinely loan our books to on...

One of the other benefits of my new Stationery Store comic book purchasing location was the fact that I could reliably get comics that I’d only been able to follow ad hoc up to that point. I’d been a mostly regular reader of SUPERMAN FAMILY for some time, but I’m not quite sure how, as the 7-11 that served as my main source of comics had stopped carrying oversized books. ...

While Valiant had had some middling success up to this point, it was really HARBINGER #1 that put the company on the map in terms of being a presence in the field. HARBINGER was the first fully-original super hero concept that was put forward by Valiant, and it shared enough of its DNA with X-MEN and NEW TEEN TITANS to evoke a positive reaction of interest from among fans...

One of the benefits that came with my new Stationery Store outlet that stocked a wider variety of comic books than the town 7-11 did was exposure to a broad range of material. The 7-11 had stopped carrying any oversized comics (which is how I had missed FANTASTIC FOUR #200 some months earlier) including all of DC’s Dollar Comics releases. But the Stationery Store took pre...